Blog #5- Social Media

Digi-nats are social buggers. They text and blog, spend time on MySpace & Facebook and interact in discussion groups with others who share their interests. They collaborate to create music and videos. We may think that their love of cyberspace is the height of anti-social behavior, but it isn't. It is in the digital world that most of our students are being their most social on any given day.

Unfortunately, in response to the public’s fear of social media as a playground for pedophiles and other dregs of society, most school districts have completely blocked any site that has even a miniscule social component. Even sites with obvious learner value like livemocha.com, a community for learning languages, are blocked. Teachers with new ideas about using social media have their hands tied by the IT gurus with their firewalls and “net nanny” software. We are left with our Powerpoints and LCD projectors while the students are begging to learn in a more global and socially interactive way.

Most social media are blocked from the classroom, but the students have access to these tools despite our best attempts to prevent them from using them. We know that cell phones are restricted in most schools, but watch what happens when there’s talk of a gang fight or other happening of concern in your school. Suddenly, every parent in the district is at your school to whisk their child away from the perceived threat. How did they find out what was going on? Simple- their children went to the bathroom, locker room or other unsupervised area, took out their cell phone and CALLED. Maybe we need to adopt the old idea of “teaching as a subversive activity” once again. Since the technology is there, we could just take on the posture that we won’t enforce the no cell phone rule in our classes as we ask the students to use the technology as a tool for learning. But to be honest, I know that I am not ready to be quite so radical in bucking the system in order to give my students a more global perspective.

So, how do we go about incorporating social media into the everyday interactions of our classrooms? In response to the perceived need for social media in the classroom, Howard Rheingold has begun an initiative to expose the value of social media in education through the site Social Media Classroom . This site encourages both teachers and other professionals to create social media platforms to enhance and deliver their curriculum. By providing access to tools to create wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, video commenting and chat, Rheingold hopes to create “a public resource of knowledge and relationships among all who are interested in the use of social media in learning, and therefore, it is made public with the intention of growing a community of participants who will take over its provisioning, governance and future evolution.” By using a social media platform specifically designed to cater to the needs of the educational community, we can expose our students to countless viewpoints and cultural perspectives in a safe and meaningful way.

As we continue to watch technology evolve and our students evolve right along with it, things are bound to change. As social media platforms become more ubiquitous, maybe our fears will subside and we will learn to monitor these platforms for the safety of our students without restricting them to the point of rendering them useless. Only time will tell.